While there have a been a handful of data storage hardware vendors who have been certified by Microsoft for their MS-SQL I/O Reliability Program, we are proud to be the first software vendor certified by Microsoft, which is a testament to the depth of our relationship that spans more than twenty years as both a Gold Partner and supplier of technology to Microsoft.
Microsoft developed the MS-SQL Server I/O Reliability Program to ensure the reliability, integrity, and availability of vendor products with MS-SQL Server. The program includes a set of requirements that, when complied with and approved by a Microsoft committee of engineers, ensure the product is fully reliable and highly available for MS-SQL Server systems. The certification applies to SQL Server running on Windows Server 2008R2 and later .
The program itself does not require performance characteristics of products, but it does require I/O testing to exhibit the reliability and integrity of the product. To that end, the full report links to a summary of before/after performance results from a HammerDB test (the preferred load test to measure MS-SQL performance) on Azure to demonstrate the gains of using Condusiv software for SQL Server 2016 on Azure’s Windows Server 2016 Data Center Edition. While transactions per minute increased 28.5% and new orders per minute increased by 28.7%, gains were considered modest by Condusiv’s standards since the test system did not tune memory to showcase the full power of what Condusiv can do with as little as 2-4GB of memory. The typical Condusiv customer sees 2X or faster SQL performance if memory is properly tuned.
Download the full report above.